Networking has become an integral part of computer systems. Advances in network bandwidths, however, have not been fully utilized due to overhead that may be associated with processing protocol stacks. A protocol stack refers to a set of procedures and programs that may be executed to handle packets sent over a network, where the packets may conform to a specified protocol. For example, TCP/IP (Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) packets may be processed using a TCP/IP stack.
Overhead may result from bottlenecks in the computer system from using the core processing module of a host processor to perform slow memory access functions such as data movement, as well as host processor stalls related to data accesses missing the host processor caches. Each memory access that occurs during packet processing may represent a potential delay as the processor awaits completion of the memory operation.
One approach to reducing overhead is to offload protocol stack processing. For example, TCP/IP stack processing may be offloaded onto a TCP/IP offload engine (hereinafter “TOE”). In TOE, the entire TCP/IP stack may be offloaded onto a networking component, such as a MAC (media access control) component, of an I/O subsystem, such as a NIC (network interface controller). However, use of a TOE to process the entire TCP/IP stack may not scale well to support a large number of connections due to the memory requirements associated with storing contexts associated with these connections.